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" . whatever there IS to see at a nuclear reactor, and so we got into his car and drove down to Indian Point 3. The area right around the reactors, called the "protected area," is much more heavily guarded than the area around the emergency-operations center, which is called the "owner-controlled area." On the drive, we passed a tall chain- link fence rimmed with concrete barri- ers and topped with motion sensors. A truck was idling at the gate while a guard inspected its undercarriage with a mirror on a long pole. Before I could enter the plant, I had to get a badge from a guard carrying a semi-automatic rifle and pass through a metal detector, an explosives detector, and, finally, a radiation detector. Next, I had to go upstairs to get a dosimeter, as well as a brief: government-mandated lecture from a radiological engineer named James Barry. On the way to Barry's office, I passed signs printed wIth slogans like "STAR: Stop, Think, Act, Review" and "STEP: Safety Takes Employee Participation." One poster said, "IP3 Practices ALARA," which stands for "as low as reasonably achiev- able" and refers to radiation exposure. Another urged employees to "Save an mREM Today." (One millirem is equal to a tenth of the amount of radiation a person would be exposed to in a typical chest X-ray.) Barry told me how to re- spond in the event of an alarm-"the 40 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2003 . one thing we don't want you to do is run or panic"-and informed me that if I saw anything that I thought constituted a hazard to myself or anyone else I had "the right to go to the N.R.C."Then he took Steets and me over to a bank of computers that read our dosimeters, through a set of doors of the sort typi- cally seen in prisons, and down to a huge concrete tub filled with water. At the bottom of the pool, metal racks holding spent fuel rods were just barely visible. For more than three decades now, the federal government has been plan- ning to construct a repository for spent uranium, with limited success. (The repository now under construction at Yucca Mountain, in the Nevada desert, will not be open until at least 2010, if .it opens at all.) In the meantime, like every other reactor in the country, In- dian Point has been obliged to store its spent fuel on-site. By now, Indian Point 3 has collected six hundred and twenty-four tons of the stuff: and In- dian Point 2 has amassed eight hun- dred and eight tons. Although the fuel is of no use in generating electricity, it is still highly radioactive and produces a great deal of heat, which is why it must always be kept submerged. Two years ago, after much prodding from groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists, the N .R. C. released a study looking at the risks of a spent-fuel fire. While the commission concluded that the risk of such a fire was low-the fuel would have to be left out of water for several hours-it acknowledged that the consequences "could be compara- ble to those for a severe reactor acci- dent." This finding is frequently cited by critics of Indian Point, who note that the spent fuel is housed outside the containment domes, in buildings that are comparatively vulnerable, and that it contains a host of extremely dan- gerous "fission products," including ra- dioactive iodine, radioactive cesium, and strontium. Gazing down into the pool, I couldn't help wondering-even though I realized that this was not the issue-what would happen if some- one fell into it. There was a lot of noise from water rushing around, and a sign that said, "Do Not Linger." Before turning in our dosimeters, we all had to have full-body radiation scans, a process that involved climbing into a closetlike structure, first frontward and then backward. I set off an alarm dur- ing mine but was assured that it didn't mean anything. As Steets and I were leaving the plant, we passed the control room. It was filled with visitors from an international nuclear operators' association, so Steets offered to take me to see the control- room simulator instead. The simulator is an exact replica of the control room, with glass replacing one wall to allow observation of trainees. When we ar- rived, a large white-haired man was lead- ing two nervous-looking younger men through a training exercise. The older man told us that the younger men were trying to keep the reactor from over- heating despite eight simultaneous mal- functions. I asked him how the exercise was going to end. "Oh, I'll be a nice guy and give them a pump back," he said, adding that be- fore that he would probably let the tem- perature of the reactor core get up to eleven hundred degrees. (The tubes holding the fuel start to crack at twelve hundred degrees.) For the first time during my visit, I thought Steets looked discouraged. A fter the meltdown at Three Mile Island, the N.R.C. resolved that every nuclear power plant in the coun- try had to have an evacuation plan.